


It's You from Before

by Roswellian



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - No SHIELD (Marvel), Amnesia, Gods, M/M, Memory Alteration, Nostalgia, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Suicidal Thoughts, Supernatural Elements, Vessel Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-05
Updated: 2015-11-05
Packaged: 2018-04-30 04:16:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5149952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Roswellian/pseuds/Roswellian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“How did you know my military ID?” Coulson asks. <br/>“If I knew why I knew it I wouldn’t be here,” says Clint.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's You from Before

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is un-Beta'd sorry. 
> 
> This fic contains very mild dub-con elements having to do with vesselhood. There are probably a lot more warnings that I can and should put on this but it's very hard to me to figure out exactly what they are because this story is a really quite one that takes place a lot in sliences and a lot of the fucked-up-ness of this fic takes place in the sliences too. 
> 
> I also have no idea how some of the issues in this fic would actually be handled leagally, so do not take me as an expert on missing anesiacs and leagal returns from the dead.

“What’s you name?” Coulson asks.

The man pauses for a minute and then says, “Clint.”

“Did you just make that up?” says Coulson.

“No,” says Clint expressionlessly, and Coulson knows he’s uncertain, knows it down to his bones even though there is not one identifiable tell on the man’s face. His answer hangs in the grey area between truth and fiction, floating in the hazy realm of plausibility.

Coulson tells himself it’s just for 24 hours, and it’s just because the police don’t have anywhere else to take him. There’s no procedures for this sort of thing. He knows that because he designed a lot of procedures for a lot of police forces. And even beyond that, it’s his job to know which forces work which ways. He knows that the New York police have no idea what to do with an amnesiac man who has not broken the law, who is not hospitalized, who does not have any clear missing persons reports, who is not ranting, raving, or clearly dangerous. This is just for 24 hours, until somebody else figures out what to do with him.

“How did you know my military ID?” Coulson asks.

“If I knew why I knew it I wouldn’t be here,” says Clint.

“Fair enough,” says Coulson. He let’s silence fall between them. It’s uneasy and stretched. Clint checks behind them as they walk through the streets. He does it casually, as if it’s a normal thing for him, it probably is. He walks silently too, his feet make no sound on the crunchy fall leaves. He’s been trained to be quiet.

Clint doesn’t really look old enough to be ex-military, not really old enough to be ex anything. The military doesn’t let people who can walk like that go, not unless they’ve been injured or dishonorably discharged. Clint doesn’t move like he’s been injured. And anyway the military keeps track of it’s people. Coulson and others like him keep track of the military. You wouldn’t find an active soldier with amnesia in central park, not with out a missing persons report and a whole hell of a lot of paperwork.

Coulson is doing that thing where he catalogues people. It’s what makes him good at his job and bad at being with normal people.

“No,” says Clint, “whatever you’re thinking I am, I’m not.”

“You wouldn’t know if you were. You’ve already told me and the police that you remember nothing at all.”

“Except your name and ID,” Clint adds helpfully, with a small twitch of his lips that is not a smirk and not a smile.

Coulson does not sigh because he’s better than that. “Yes,” he agrees dryly, “except my name and ID number.”

……..

There was a forest outside Coulson’s house when he was a kid. Large and empty. Not truly wild, not truly tame either. At night he would look out at the birch trees and see crooked leaning teeth and the yawning maw of the dark woods. There were things in those tree, people said, monsters and ghosts and spirits. On good nights one could here them rustling through the branches, sometimes laughing sometimes sobbing.

And, yet, Coulson loved that forest dearly. It sheltered him through childhood and puberty. It opened its arms to him when he had no where else to go. Other children might have retreated to their rooms in the face of tragedy or unfairness, but he retreated beyond the trees and spilled out his anger in the form of obscenities until he learned control, learned to box it all away. He imagined, still imagines now, that one day somebody will cut down one of those trees and find embedded in the rings all those uncomfortable feelings of loneliness that he had once spilled there for no audience but the trees.

There is a time, long after Coulson grows up, when his underlings joke that Coulson buried his heart in a dark wood so as not to have any inconvenient feelings. They are not as wrong as they think they are.

It was not that Coulson had a particularly dramatic childhood, nor one stained with immediately recognizable tragedy. It was just a lonely one, expended mostly in the process of him learning how to care for himself. Somewhere in the midst of figuring things out he found that feelings of rage, senses of abandonments, pits of despair were of very little use. So he went to the woods and left them there were the laughing breeze could carry them away in its soft arms.

…..

Coulson is unsure what to do with a stranger in his apartment. He went to make coffee and hoped that Clint would figure out what he’s was supposed to do for him. Clint took off his shoes (old boots perfectly broken in, with soles so well worn that he could probably have felt the bricks on the street) and his coat (faded purple canvas, fleece lined, fraying seams) and began to pace.

“If you want you can use my shower.” Says Coulson over the kitchen island.

“I don’t remember the last time I took a shower.” Clint says. It might be a joke, but it also might be a sad confession. Coulson doesn’t laugh, he simply stares at Clint. “Yeah… okay… I would like to use your shower.”

“There are towels in the restroom,” Coulson says, hesitates for a second, then adds “I’ll lay out some of my clothes for you. I think my sweat pants will fit.”

Clint nods sharply and disappears around the corner, effortlessly stepping over the squeaky floorboard. Coulson watches him go.

Clint makes him uneasy.

Something about his reaction to waking up in central park with no memory beyond a few words, is just deeply wrong. It’s actually more accurately called a lack of reaction. It’s Coulson’s job to predict reactions, to understand how situations develop. The absence of information never leads to nothing; in fact it usually means panic and desperation. Yet Clint’s bland smile, his curiously stormy eyes, his measured steps hold nothing.

Coulson goes through his Clint’s jacket pockets. He’s not proud. He also knows the police will have already done it, but he’s curious. There’s a dappled brown feather in the inside pocket, and a birch twig in the out side front left. On instinct he holds the jack up to nose and inhales as deeply as he can. It smells like the obvious canvas and wool and like wood smoke and wet ground. It smells like a storm wore it and not a person. Coulson sneezes.

He’s frozen there with the jacket in his hands, when Clint reappears. He opens his mouth, “There’s blood on your bathroom tile,” he says.

“What are you talking about?” Coulson says easily hiding the startled part of himself, but still not understanding what the words meant.

“I don’t understand half the bottles that are in your shower,” Clint continues, why are some of them orange, and some of them pink? I mean there weren’t that many, but what’s the difference between shampoo and conditioner, anyway? I guess one’s clear and the other’s like a cream, but they both say for hair. So what’s the difference? Why does hair have to have more than one bottle? Why does hair have to have a bottle of stuff anyway?”

“Shut up,” says Coulson. Clint does. “Why is there blood on my tile?”

“Because I didn’t want to get any on your towel.”

“Why was there blood?”

“I fell in the shower and hit my head.”

“Sit” Coulson tells him, and he does. There is indeed blood running through Clint’s wet hair, making what once was sandy and dirty blond red. Coulson set’s the medical kit, and he sits with Clint between he’s knees and cleaned the wound. Clint shivers against Coulson. Their bodies press together in the quiet apartment. Outside it rains.

…….

Coulson wakes to the sound of Clint throwing up in the bathroom.

They meet in the hallway. Clint wiping his mouth, Coulson holding a glass of water. The light is pale and thin. It leaks through the window, drips across the floor, and makes Clint look otherworldly and strange in a way that terrifies Coulson, a man who has been shot at and tortured more times than he can count on his fingers. 

“I’m cold,” Clint whispers.

“I left you a blanket on the couch.” Coulson says. He holds his hand out hoping that Clint will take the water, relieve him of his duty as reluctant host, free him from the prison presented by meeting a stranger in your hallway. Clint doesn’t take the water, doesn’t do anything.

“It wasn’t enough,” there is a shiver in Clint’s voice as he says it, just beneath the surface of his words, almost imperceptible, but there for Coulson to hear none the less.

“There’s…” Coulson begins intending to offer him a quilt from the cupboard. Instead, he ends up saying “I’ll make you some tea.” He shoves the words out of his mouth sure that he has made a mistake.

He has. Everything about Clint’s face that, a few moments ago, might have been described as open disappears behind a mask of gruffness. “I can make it my self.” He says it with such absolute certainty that Coulson trusts his judgment implicitly even though something in him is screaming not to trust Clint whose hands are shaking with cold or something else unidentifiable.

“The mugs tea and kettle are all above the stove,” he says before retreating in to his room.

…….

When he get’s up in the morning Clint is still shivering on the couch and there are two mugs on the counter, one empty and one full but cold made exactly the way he likes it. He gets dressed, calls the police station leaves a message, brushes his teeth, makes some toast and coffee, gets a call back form the police station, and leaves a note for Clint.

He pauses at the door and turned on his heel to look at the man on his couch. His eyes were closed but they dart beneath his lids. Coulson goes to the closet, the one opposite his room that he hardly ever goes into, and digs until his fingers touch wires. With a small but triumphant noise hastily swallowed he pulls out the electric blanket his sister had given him when he first came home from war unused to the feeling of winter on his skin.

When he heads out the door for a second time that morning the blanket is plugged in and tucked around Clint.

…….

Coulson’s mother dressed for their first hunt together in the same business like way she did anything. She did not look at Coulson who had been dressed for an hour in nervous anticipation. He looked at her. Watched her careful slow fingers tie up her salt and pepper hair in an austere bun. Watched her roll up the sleeves of her flannel shirt to reveal gnarled arms and an anchor tattoo. Watched her stow her pocket knife and her skinning knife on her belt and fill each pocket of her vest with shotgun shells.

Coulson had watched this particular routine, preformed like a dance at the dining room table, every Saturday that fell in hunting season for 10 years. Yet, he found himself surprised that his inclusion in the preparations had made no difference to their practice. Later, he calls himself foolish for being disappointed. His mother would never sacrifice those moments, not even for him. 

When they were out in the woods, ghosting along the path, she stopped and handed him a shotgun. He’d been shooting bottles off the wall in the backyard with her too big gun all year. At first he had shaken, but soon the butt of the gun had pushed callouses into his skin and he’d gotten used to the spray of glass. The gun she handed him was smaller, still to big for his twelve-year-old hands, but lighter with a trigger that better fit his fingers.

“That’s yours,” she says, “you’ll clean it and care for it. It has less recoil than mine so factor that in when you take the shot.”

He nods back at her and that’s enough of that.

…….

“What’s wrong Coulson?”

“Absolutely nothing,” he says, doing his best at projecting mildness into the space between them.

“Clouson,” Hill says again. She’s smiling a thin smile so that Coulson can she her feline sharp teeth against her red lipstick. She only ever does that when she’s after something. “You have not been late a single day sense you hired me 6 years ago. You have missed exactly four days of non holiday work, all with at least a month’s notice, and all for disgustingly reasonable reasons. You were late this morning by almost an hour. Did somebody die?”

“I faced a series of inconveniences this morning that is all, Ms. Hill. I assure you that you will know when somebody has died, or” he says narrowing his eyes, “when somebody is about to.”

Hill acknowledges the warning with a tilt of her head, but none the less chooses to speed right past it. “Respectfully, Sir,” she says with a crisp and sarcastic salute, “I do not think I would. It would be a surprise to see you give away distress for anything short of a full on alien invasion.”

“Well,” Coulson says and turns his face away to hide a slight smile, his hand on the door to his office, “I have a reputation as an unfeeling monolith to maintain.”

“Certainly all the junior analysts would shit themselves with fear if they saw you so much as smile,” she agrees. Coulson breathes a soft laugh and opens the door to his office, Hill follows him in. He knows she’s there even if she moves like the cat-pawed fog Carl Sandburg once wrote about.

“Coulson,” She says one the door is closed, voice full of unrelenting softness, “I hope you know that if something is wrong you can tell me. I am not a junior analyst and I am not your enemy.”

He scrubs at his face with his hand. It is, for him, a brief and unusual concession to fatigue and stress, before he shuffles everything away again into the nothingness of his bland face. “Nothing is wrong, Ms. Hill, but rest assured if it was you would be the first person in this office I would confide in. I would, however, like a list of special forces disappearances in the last year, particularly Navy Seals and Army Rangers, at your first possible convenience.”

In the space of a second Hill does her own version of that calculated retreat, leaving the voice of a concerned friend hanging in the air and not in her throat. Her question when it comes is professionalism all the way down, “What report is this for, Sir?”

“This is not for a report.” He admits.

“Oh, so this is one of your legendary hunches is it?”

“Something like that,” he says and thinks of Clint at home on the couch, alone in his apartment, alone in Coulson’s life. This the sum totality of his hunch: Clint is ex-something-or-other, spit out but still walking around like a man in a war, and that Clint has been missed. He has the feel of man who would be missed by someone, somewhere, if only for his skill at walking quietly in the dark.

…….

“Don’t move or you’ll frighten it,” Coulson’s mother said, when they found the deer.

Coulson has heard this line on TV a hundred times. He had always thought his mother’s words when they finally went hunting together would be more interesting, but maybe she only spoke in hunter’s platitudes for the purpose of grounding him in the unfamiliar woods. Not that he needs it, he is more familiar with the trees than she is; his explorations are not mandated by federally set hunting seasons. Or maybe she said it because she really was that boring.

…….

The Police call again on Coulson’s way home. The man on the other end of the line is Sargent John Johnson, who was famous in the army for having two first names but still being trustworthy. He is a friend of Coulson’s and also the man who called him when Clint started spouting his name an ID.

“There’s nothing,” Jonson says.             

“What do you mean there’s nothing. We live in a world where forums are signed and filed in triplicate at every opportunity. There’s never nothing.” He says.

There is never nothing. This is certainty that Coulson has always had, but one in recent years that he has reaffirmed within himself. That he has very specifically had to hold onto. When he is looking at satellite images and intelligence reports and rumors of rumors captured on paper he has to believe that there is never nothing, that every action leaves a trace in space that a well trained eye can capture. He has to believe it because his reports mean that people go out and risk their lives to respond to what he says is there. He learned early on that you can’t be good at being an analyst if you’re always scared of the things you cannot see. There is always something.

“Look Coulson,” Johnson says, “we did the normal search of missing person’s reports. We searched his finger prints, we searched everything that we could legally search. As far as we know he’s no one.”

“I think he’s special forces, maybe his records are sealed.” Coulson suggests.

“That’s a possibility, I’ll look into it,” Johnson hms into the tone in a thoughtful way, “but in the meantime can you keep an eye one him. I know that’s a lot to ask, man. It’s just we can’t legally keep him here, amnesia’s not a crime, but we need to know where he is in the event that we figure out who he is.”

“It’s no trouble,” says Coulson insincerely.  

“Look,” Johnson says, finally, “whoever this Clint guy is, I don’t think he has anybody who’s missing him.”

…….

The deer did not look at him. It did not notice as Coulson raised the shotgun to his shoulder and sighted its heart between the barrels. Invisibility was already something that Coulson cultivated, but this was different. It was not a human he was hiding from, and not a careful impression of mediocrity that masked him. Instead the trees wrapped his mother and him in their leaves, and their concealment existed only on the whim of the forest breezes.

It felt dangerous, perched on the edge of a clearing, waiting for the moment to take the shot.

…….

Clint is hunched over a cup of tea; the electric blanket is thrown around his shoulders. He looks up when Coulson unlocks his door, but his eyes are glassy and storm colored as opposed to yesterday’s cloudless blue.

“I turned up your thermostat,” Clint says. He doesn’t move.

The sink is littered with tea bags. Coulson counts them. There are eight that spill their guts across the stainless steel basin. He sets down his bags and open up the garbage to see several of the coffee house sugar packs he keeps above the stove but nothing else. There are no dishes in the sink. His unfortunate guest has consumed nothing but tea since before whatever had torn through his mind had done its damage.

Coulson makes soup. It’s from a can and it’s probably a little past its expiry date but his fingers are tired today and he doesn’t think Clint can wait much longer. He nearly burns it. He nearly burns soup, that’s ridiculous, he thinks because he’s been cooking for himself for ages now. As long as he can remember.

The soup is streaming when he hands it to Clint, who looks at it suspiciously. “How do I know you’re not trying to poison me?” he says. He glares at the soup with narrowed eyes that cannot hide the hunger that boils behind them.

“How do you know I’m not trying to keep you from starving to death?” says Coulson whose mouth is so very dry.

“Fair enough,” is Clint’s response but he doesn’t begin to eat. He moves the metal spoon through the soup and watches the noodles swirl. His hands shake a little and a bead of sweat rolls its gentle, caressing way down his neck.

The soup is looking less and less appetizing to Coulson by the moment, but he’s not the person who’s supposed to be eating it but is resolutely not eating it. Coulson pulls from within him self that container of force in which he keeps the steely thing that allowed him, a twenty-two-year-old to speak commands in a war wrecked town and be obeyed. He lets it seep into his voice.

“Eat.” He says.

Clint stiffens a little and lifts to spoon to his mouth but does not eat. “It’s so warm.” He says.

“Eat it before it gets cold,” Coulson says with as much of his sternness and as little of his pity as he can manage.

He touches Clint then, on the shoulder, to reassure him that he is there. Clint flinches beneath his hand. It is a barely visible movement but one that Coulson can feel through his fingers, none the less. Coulson’s view of Clint shifts, again. It is a quite reorientation, a private one, that no one but Coulson sees. He thinks that he might understand, just a little, what Clint is feeling now for all that he still has his memories, still has people to remember him and look for him, and is certain of his name.

…….

“Take the shot” His mother said her voice steady, steely, and just a little bit angry under all those calm syllables.

Coulson could not quite bring himself to do it. His hands shook. The deer was not the colorful bottle glass that he had spent a season or more shooting in the back garden. When the bullet hit there would not be a a spray of shard shining in the sun for him to go and sweep up. Instead, there would be blood and the butchering would have to be done.  No matter how many times his mother told him there was no difference, that the action was the same either way, he knew that they were not the same thing.

…

Coulson wakes to the sound of Clint throwing up in the bathroom, again. This time he doesn’t hover in the hallway and instead plows into the little room with a class of water in his hand and a clean towel. Clint is shivering on the tile floor. Coulson starts the bathtub filling before he even speaks to Clint.

Clint doesn’t respond when Colson tells him to strip, and it soon becomes clear that he’s fallen into a feverish sleep. Coulson should take him to the hospital but he knows Clint wouldn’t thank him for it, and also he doesn’t really care to explain how he came to be caring for a feverish man with no medical records and no insurance. That’s selfish of him he knows, but he would rather strangeness bleed into his life in the privacy of his white tile bathroom where he has some semblance of control.

His hands are gentle when he peels of Clint’s shirt. It’s soaked with sweat. Beneath is golden sun kissed skin marred by crisscross scars. Coulson touched Clint’ midriff to peel away the borrow sweats he’s wearing. He does not touch the scar there. It’s long sense turned to red silk but It doesn’t look survivable. It looks like something with long teeth came and tore into Clint’ stomach and gorged it’s self there. Coulson does not touch it in the way that one does not touch a thorn bush.

“It’s so cold,” Clint says into Coulson’s chest when he picks him to put him in the tub. It is unclear weather he has woken up or is still locked in a delirious place between dreams and reality by the fever, and is merely sleep talking.

“It’s a lot better than Siberia,” Coulson says because that is his automatic response whenever cold weather is mentioned. It usually makes people shut up, because it usually makes people remember that he is an old soldier. People don’t argue with old soldiers, much.

“Nick thought his toes were gonna fall off.” Clint says with out opening his eyes. He says it casually like someone who’s just saying the next line in a song, dancing an old dance. He’s lucky he was already in the water because Coulson nearly dropped him in shock.

It was true. Nick had though his toes were going to fall off. He had checked them every hour that they were forced to sit, waiting for new orders, in that hell-hole of a un heated cabin in Siberia. He’d made Coulson check them too. “I’ve already lost an eye, Cheese, I can’t loose my toes too,’ he had said and meant it. Mostly Fury was the scariest motherfucker around but sometimes he has just as scared as every other soldier. He cared about things like his toes.

Coulson had never told anybody about that trip outside the fact that he had been there and it had been cold, hadn’t been allowed. It was highly classified, and anyway even if Clint had known about his trip from the file, he couldn’t have shouldn’t have been able to know about Fury’s fear. It hadn’t ever passed his lips and he was sure that Fury hadn’t told him. Fury would never because people would laugh just like the wind had as it wuthered around that little cabin in Siberia.

“How did you know that?” Coulson asks.

“I remembered it” Clint mumbled. His shivers caused ripples in the steaming bath. Slowly his eyes drifted closed, and Coulson found himself compelled to sit on the could tile and make sure he did not drown him self.

There were a thousand things that Coulson wanted to say, to ask, the stranger. Most of them were fears, because nothing was right now. The world had cracked and Clint had slipped in through the spaces left unpatched.

Clint grabbed Coulson’s hand in his fevered sleep as if he knew that great bubbles of unease were rising through Coulson’s chest. He held on tight and did not let go till his fever broke at midnight.

……

“Take the shot,” His mother said, again, and he did.


End file.
